Forget all that rubbish you hear about the horrors of commuting. For some of us, it's the best part of the day

When the train-drivers' union Aslef decided to call off the second of its three one-day strikes yesterday, I wasn't sure whether to cheer or weep. There were at least two good reasons to weep. First, we commuters had been given permission via the sovereign authority of South West Trains, the company at whom the industrial action was aimed, to skive off work. For weeks, announcements on trains and platforms from Weymouth to Waterloo have been asking us whether "our journeys are absolutely necessary". It's the kind of cosmic question I'm unwilling to answer.

Thanks to Aslef's consideration in calling the strikes for a Friday and Monday, we'd had time to soften up bosses for the inevitable absence, book late-summer weekends away in Penzance or Paris, or just pray for good weather to slob about in the garden for an extended weekend. Suddenly, the moral rug for such lotus-eating had been whipped out from under us.

There was a second reason to weep: I had already started this column in the belief that the strike would go ahead. Still, I was assured by the editor that I shouldn't let a little thing like that stand in my way. Which is just as well, because it's the reason to cheer that really interests me. It meant that normal service had been resumed, and that our cherished routines could be reinstated. By which I don't mean our work routines, but our travel routines. If I'm honest, it seems quite possible that unless I had a date in the studio on one of these days, my presence would not be too sorely missed. The loss would be entirely mine, deprived of my speeding (relatively), comfortable (relatively), quiet (save for occasional instructions for travelling on strike days) cocoon. And I don't think I'm alone.

Commuters love to complain about the drudgery of their lot, the endless repetition, only varied by the delays caused by signal failures, faulty rolling stock, and leaf and snow-strewn tracks. In fact, I think most of them love it. Where else in these days of lost community would you be able to meet people in the same place, at the same time, every day; and yet still, if you wish, seal yourself off in a work-free, spouse-free zone, and just do your own thing? It's certainly how people behave, even if they don't acknowledge it, working out to the last centimetre where trains will stop, so that they can occupy the same seat, facing the same way, to join the same card school or unofficial drinking club.

Or am I burdening innocent commuters who hate train travel as much as they say they do with my own peculiar relationship with the train? You see, the counter-intuitive truth is that, as a blind person, that uniform environment provides me with one of the most comfortable settings I'm ever likely to find.

So-called common sense will tell people that trains are noisy, have nasty gaps between themselves and their platforms, and are full of people desperately sharpening up their elbows as a rehearsal for the January sales. In reality, they are controlled environments, small enough to be encompassed with a sweep of the arms, and full of helpful sounds and textures that mean you can locate where you are at any moment. Doors bleep when they open and close, departure is still signified by the traditional whistle, and even the density of heaving bodies means that help is only ever a shuffle away.

The fact that this help sometimes consists of being grabbed under the arms and practically pitchforked on to the train or the platform is neither here nor there. That's better than being left gawping at a departing train, or being shunted into a siding because you couldn't get off before they closed the doors. And then there's that peace! That small discreet space, still large enough to store all the things you need to write a book, have a meal and go to sleep, and yet enclosed enough to feel like a haven. Just a hint of rose-coloured spectacles? Well, OK, I would admit to that: none the less, I've read some of the best books, had some of my best ideas and, yes, even met some of the nicest people on trains.

Hence the touch of panic at the oft-repeated suggestions that I should search my conscience to see how necessary my journey was. Because it brought me to the uncomfortable conclusion that actually, the journey was the point, rather than what I did when I got there.

As I say, I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. What strikes me is that what commuters have when they wake up in the morning is what most people crave: certainty. They know the times of the trains they have to catch, where they will be, where they will stop, who will be on them, and what they will do. Would they really want to go back to the days of coming to at dawn, and having to decide what they're going to do that day?

God, that would be like being a teenager all over again. All that angst about when to get up, what to have for breakfast, who to ring up to have an endless and pointless conversation with, which drugs to take . . . It's precisely what's wrong with home-working. All those decisions, and not a train whistle or station announcement to tell you to board the train!

Maybe the search for certainty lies at the heart of this week's other major story. I'm not sure if Tony Blair has ever had to commute, but it could be that this is what he needs. It has been assumed that his tardiness in naming the day is an unwillingness to let go of power, or an attempt to foist his agenda, ready-formed, on an unwilling Gordon Brown. It might simply be that he, like others before him, has got used to the certainties of being prime minister: the comfort of having a list of things to do, places to go, people to schmooze. Forget the glamour and the power - this is just the uncertainty of a man who doesn't want to wake up in the morning and have to think what to do. After nearly 10 years, that would come as a terrible shock.

And by the way, if "education, education, education" is to be Blair's swan song, as well as his rallying cry, I would just like to ask: "Does my granddaughter Hannah have to have all of it?" She started school this week, a diminutive figure aged slightly less than four-and-a-half, and I've been worrying whether her childhood is being commandeered a little too soon. If you're reading this, Hannah, good luck and I hope the quality matches the quantity.

This week: Peter read Leo McKinstry's portrait of the cricketer Geoffrey Boycott. "Startling but always fair - he is the best sports biographer currently writing." Peter also listened to Radio 4's dramatisation of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, starring John Hurt and Sarah Smart: "Join me - it hasn't got to the serious sex yet."